When you set goals and make a plan, do you have an outcome in mind? Of course you do…otherwise what would be the point, right? Setting goals and making a plan is an important part of achievement. But setting goals in stone can have the opposite effect because the minute you veer off course for whatever reason, you bail. You’re done. You’ve failed. Or worse, you assume ahead of time that you can’t stick to the plan and you don’t even get started. It’s important to realize that being flexible and making adjustments along the way can also be part of the plan.

How about trying something different?

What if you allowed your goals to be flexible, changeable, and movable? What if you said this is my goal, this is how I plan to get there, but I’m open to rethinking and recalculating along the way?

What if you make the most important part getting started and continuously moving forward?

This would take the focus off perfection…off having to take each step as it was planned. You could stop believing that there is only one way to get there and only one outcome that is acceptable.

Why is this so important?

Because life throws you curveballs. Stuff comes your way that you have no way of controlling. You can’t anticipate and plan for every possible roadblock. Rather than giving up, you need to be ready for the roadblock and adjust accordingly.

There is a very long list of people that started out going in one direction with a goal and ended with an outcome they didn’t see coming.

John Wayne narrowly failed to make it into Annapolis. Instead he went to USC on a football scholarship but Plan B was derailed as well when he was cut from the team due to injuries from a surfing accident. Instead of giving up and going home hanging his head he found work at a local film studio to support himself—and the rest, of course, is history.

In 1968, Spencer Silver was working at 3M trying to create super strong adhesives for use in the aerospace industry—but he didn’t. Instead he accidentally created a pressure sensitive adhesive—and Post it Notes were born. Unrealized goals can result in a “happy accident” if you forge on and don’t give up. This is how the world ended up with microwaves, potato chips, and penicillin. And isn’t everyone grateful.

If you never set goals or make a plan toward something, you achieve nothing. If you are brave enough to set a specific goal with a specific outcome, you just might achieve it. And if you don’t, you might achieve something else, which very possibly could be even better. At the very least you will still be further ahead than if you did nothing at all.

Only by taking action do you allow the possibility of destiny, fate, kismet, or divine intervention. Ready? GO!